Tomato fruit harvest with manual labor is a costly process. Synchronized vine ripening of tomato fruits allows either mechanical harvest or once over manual harvest which is much more cost effective. Even with varieties having a determinate growth habit the duration of flowering and fruit set ranges between 3 to 6 weeks and this reflects on the duration of fruit ripening. With tomatoes, mechanical harvesting of ripe fruit is possible only in the spring summer-season, in which the ripening period is shorter than the flowering one due to a continuous rise in temperature. But even in this case some fruit stay ripe on the vine for a few weeks, which results in poor quality.
Nowadays, methods of concentrating yield within a rather short period of time are based on cultivation of certain genotypes in certain seasons, usually planting in spring and summer. Although this method provides satisfactory results, it is restricted to certain seasons of the year.